Cosmological milestones and gravastars - topics in general relativity

TL;DR

This thesis explores cosmological singularities and milestones in general relativity, providing a detailed classification and conditions for their occurrence, and investigates the physical plausibility of gravastars as black hole alternatives, emphasizing the necessity of anisotropic pressures.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive classification of cosmological milestones using power series and conditions for their existence, and demonstrates that gravastars require anisotropic pressures, challenging the perfect fluid assumption.

Findings

Characterization of cosmological milestones with conditions for their occurrence.

Demonstration that gravastars cannot be perfect fluid spheres due to anisotropic pressures.

Higher compactness bounds for gravastars compared to traditional models.

Abstract

In this thesis, we consider two different problems relevant to general relativity. Over the last few years, opinions on physically relevant singularities occurring in FRW cosmologies have considerably changed. We present an extensive catalogue of such cosmological milestones using generalized power series both at the kinematical and dynamical level. We define the notion of "scale factor singularity" and explore its relation to polynomial and differential curvature singularities. We also extract dynamical information using the Friedmann equations and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of cosmological milestones such as big bangs, big crunches, big rips, sudden singularities and extremality events. Specifically, we provide a complete characterization of cosmological milestones for which the dominant energy condition is satisfied. The second problem looks at one of the very small number of serious alternatives to the usual concept of an astrophysical black hole, that is, the gravastar model developed by Mazur and Mottola. By considering a generalized class of similar models with continuous pressure (no infinitesimally thin shells) and negative central pressure, we demonstrate that gravastars cannot be perfect fluid spheres: anisotropic pressures are unavoidable. We provide bounds on the necessary anisotropic pressure and show that these transverse stresses that support a gravastar permit a higher compactness than is given by the Buchdahl-Bondi bound for perfect fluid stars. We also comment on the qualitative features of the equation of state that such gravastar-like objects without any horizon must have.